News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022). Khalid’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2024 semester, during which time he will continue his writing and meet informally with students. Khalid will give a public reading at Bard during his residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another. First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail. Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West. And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.”

“I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.” 

Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. The 2023 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Violet Kupersmith for her novel, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House 2021).

Bard College’s Clemente Course, a college-level introduction to the humanities taught by Marina Van Zuylen, Clemente Chair in the Humanities at Bard College and national academic director of Clemente, was featured in the Times Union. “Some students who take the Clemente Course continue their higher education—many have received full scholarships to enroll at Bard College—while others have started businesses, nonprofit organizations or have run for office,” writes Maria M. Silva for Times Union. The program, which will run from October 5 until January 26 via Zoom and in person in Kingston, offers free, accredited humanities courses to economically and educationally disadvantaged adults who will learn about US history, writing, literature, philosophy, and art history through class discussions, readings, and written assignments. Students who complete the course earn six college credits from Bard that can be transferred to any institution of higher education. “These professors teach right under these banners that read ‘education is a human right’ and that dictates the way they approached us,” Michael Atkin, one of Clemente’s most recent graduates, told Silva. “I went in with very high hopes and in fact, I couldn’t have even imagined how great it would be.”

On Friday, September 22, Bard College is hosting After Chinua Achebe: African Writing and the Future, an event honoring the memory of the late Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), former Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature. 

A symposium in the afternoon in the Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center will examine the current flowering of writing by African authors, in Africa and in the diaspora. The symposium will be followed by the dedication of a room in the Stevenson Library at Bard in memory of Achebe. 

The event will begin at 2:00 pm on Friday, September 22, with a dance performance by Souleymane Badolo celebrating the life of Achebe, followed by an opening address by President Leon Botstein. There will be two panel discussions, Writing Beyond Africa: The African imagination in the diaspora at 2:30 pm, and Activism and the Word: Writing, speech and song in African political culture at 4 pm. Confirmed panelists include the novelists Nuruddin Farah, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu and Fatin Abbas, and the musician and activist DJ Switch. 

The event is sponsored by President's Office, the Hannah Arendt Center, the Stevenson Library, Africana Studies, and the Offices of the Dean and Alumni/ae Affairs. Members of the Achebe family will be in attendance, and the event is free and open to the public.

Bard College thanks Penguin Press and Penguin Classics for their support by providing copies of The African Trilogy.
 
Chinua Achebe was a groundbreaking Nigerian writer best known for his first and most influential novel, Things Fall Apart. He wrote numerous other books, including works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and children's books. Professor Achebe received more than 30 honorary degrees, as well as many awards for his work. From 1990 to 2009 he was the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. 

“The idea of writing remains quite poignant to students, but we often think of it as this very private, creative act,” said Dinaw Mengestu, director of the Center for Ethics and Writing, director of the Written Arts Program, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities, on WAMC’s The Best of Our Knowledge. “In doing so, we fail to make the argument for writing as more than just a personal, creative act, but as something that can be responsive to the world around us.” By engaging students with challenging texts and tasking them with considering the role language plays in shaping the world, Mengestu says the Center is already attracting students who might not have taken a writing course previously. “It becomes less about an elite, privileged discourse, and more about something that students from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds find that they can actually engage with,” Mengestu said.